Last year, I shared with you a superhero drawing by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles which was done for one of my newspaper articles back when we were both attending the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973. For Toles fans out there, here are a few more rarities which I doubt anyone has seen in more than 35 years.

At right is the cover Tom did for a magazine called Cosmos which was edited by Michael Stephen Levinson and paid for with student funds. How do I know that this periodical was put out with student funds? Because there’s a letter printed on the inside cover damning Levinson’s venture with faint praise from none other than Leslie Fiedler, author of the famed Love and Death in the American Novel and “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” (more…)

As part of my lifelong attempt to prove to the world that I have no shame, I’ve just uploaded a fifth excerpt from my gig as Toastmaster at the 2000 Nebula Awards. In this clip, I explain to the crowd one of the important differences between the Nebulas and the Oscars.

Those of you who were there or who heard from others about that sordid moment will know what to expect. As for the rest of you, well, you’ll just have to decide whether you’re brave enough.

There are some things which once seen cannot be unseen. The choice is yours. You were warned.

I dreamt last night that Irene and I were moving back to New York. (Yeah, right, like that’s ever going to happen.) We were moving to an apartment in Times Square. (Yeah, right, like we could ever afford that even if it was going to happen.)

In the dream, I was wandering the first floor of the chosen apartment building, which was being used as a dance studio, with many people leaping around in leotards in time to piano music. I wandered the immense room until I finally found the doorway which opened on the stairs which led up to our apartment.

I unloaded the first box of books from the Jeep we’d parked on the street and carried it upstairs. As I came back down for the next box, who should I find at the foot of the stairs, each lugging a box to help me move in, but Stephen King and Ray Bradbury! And even though Bradbury appeared to be the same age as when last I’d seen him, he was on his feet, full of strength, no longer wheelchair bound. Both men were smiling, laughing, jovial. They’d happened to bump into Irene standing by the car full of boxes, and wanted to help.

The next thing I remember, we were done, all unpacked. And as I looked around the apartment, trying to recall which room I’d chosen to use as my office, I wondered how we had gotten there. I couldn’t remember why we’d moved back, what the motivating factor had been. And in the dream, we’d only been gone from the city five years, not 24 as in real life.

“Exactly why are we here again?” I kept asking Irene, confused, trying to figure out why we’d decided to return. When I looked out the window, I could see that our apartment was no longer in the Times Square area, but instead in Coney Island. I could see the Cyclone roller coaster, the parachute jump. But that didn’t give me any answers. I woke, never having any idea what had caused me to return.

Greg Frost just pointed out an unsettling claim to fame over on his twitter feed—his novel Shadowbridge, along with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, was photographed on the bedside table of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the poor woman who finally escaped after having been held captive for 18 years.

Greg’s book was at the top of the pile:

Photographs also reveal a bookcase filled with by books Isaac Asimov, Greg Bear, Brian Lumley, Anne McCaffrey and others, including a heck of a lot of Dean Koontz:

I can’t even begin to imagine the horror Dugard felt while locked away like that. And what must have been going through her mind as she read the Foundation trilogy and other books in search of some kind of momentary escape, I’m at a loss to imagine … it’s just too horrifying to contemplate.

But I pass these photos on so that those whose psychic armor is a bit thicker can make of them what they will.

Continuing my efforts to make sure history won’t be the lost in the event anything catastrophic were to happen to my possessions—one reason I shared a never-before-seen Don Perlin drawing two weeks ago—here’s another missing piece of the Marvel puzzle.

Back in the late ’70s, I wrote seven issues of Captain Marvel. (That’s Marvel Comics’ alien Captain Marvel, not the Captain Marvel of the Billy Batson/Shazam variety.) Here’s the cover from my penultimate issue, cover-dated January 1978:

The cover was drawn by Keith Pollard, while the interior of the issue was drawn by George Tuska. All but the final page, that is, which was drawn by Dave Cockrum: (more…)

Here’s another snippet from the 2000 Nebulas Awards ceremony during which I played the role of Toastmaster.

Prepare yourself for what follows my introduction of Joe Haldeman. I’m sure you’ll get choked up, as did I, when you see the late Octavia Butler take the stage to accept her trophy. You’ll easily be able to tell how much she was loved—the announcement of her win produced the most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

As for my joke about Paul Levinson and singing at Nebulas, that refers back to a clip from the evening which I haven’t yet shared here … but which I’ll upload soon if you all behave.

Yesterday, Irene and I visited Marie Severin and whisked her away to Blackstone Steakhouse to celebrate her 80th birthday. As I’ve told you before, we both love Marie. She’s the nicest person we ever met in comics, one of the most talented, and easily the funniest. When Irene and I realized during our last visit that such a momentous milestone was moving toward her (uh-oh—one evening with Marie and I’m alliterating like Stan again), we decided that attention must be paid.

So we told Marie that unless one of her friends had already made plans, we wanted to take her out to dinner. Heck, if a friend had already made plans, we’d take the friend, too! But luckily for us, Marie was free last night, and so we had her to ourselves for a long and hilarious evening. Here we all are after having demolished an amazing meal:

Before heading to the restaurant, we spent an hour or so at her apartment, and one of the things we did was show her printouts I’d made yesterday morning of sites which had wished her a happy birthday. She was astounded by the outpouring of love, and astonished by some of them, particularly the lengthy write-up at fanboy.com of her career. When I read her part of it aloud, such as the sentences— (more…)

Tonight, Irene and I will be having dinner with the friend pictured below to celebrate—

Well … that’s for us to know and for you to figure out.

Can you guess who it is?

UPDATE: That is, of course, Marie Severin, who was celebrating her 80th birthday on that day.

Is it possible to overdose on ham? Today’s the day we find out, because this restaurant is serving up another helping of me from the 2000 Nebula Awards weekend. The latest clip shows me introducing John Kessel, who then announces the winner in the Best Novella category.

If you bother to watch this all the way through, you’ll learn who won that year, but you won’t see anyone take the stage to claim the trophy, because a) the winner wasn’t present (and SFWA long ago abandoned the “you must be present to win” rule), plus b) even without the acceptor reading the e-mailed speech, the clip was already at 9:50, and if included would have put it way over YouTube’s 10-minute limit.

Even if you don’t want to watch this because I bore you to tears, watch it for John—he’s hilarious!

I published a poem by Gene van Troyer 25 years ago in Last Wave, but I never got to know him as well as I would have liked. That’s primarily because he moved to Japan (sometime in the mid-’70s, I think), and so our paths never crossed on the con circuit.

The one time we got to sit and talk at length was at the Worldcon in Yokohama, at which we spent an undisturbed hour in the SFWA suite catching up on each other’s lives and promising to spend more time together during some future trip to Japan. Sadly, that won’t be happening, as he died July 17, 2009 of cancer. Here we are back in 2007.

Here’s what SFWA had to say about him. He seemed like a nice guy, and I wish I’d gotten to know him better. I plan on pulling down some of his poetry today and spending some time remembering him.

Here’s one of his poems so you can do the same.

Here’s another.